[a.c.s] Microsoft Readies Nukes for their Support Newsgroups

First Duke University announces the end of their news server, now
Microsoft is announcing the end of their support newsgroups. In total,
Microsoft currently supports over 2,000 public newsgroups, and 2,200
private newsgroups that contain a variety of discussions on just about
every Microsoft product available. And apparently this is all coming to an
end starting in June of 2010.

In an announcement made by Microsoft, the software giant will be closing
all of its newsgroups and shifting traffic to its forums. This decision
was made for several reasons, as Microsoft cites that declining usage, 90
day retention, and spam are making the environment unsustainable.

"Beginning in June 2010, Microsoft will begin closing newsgroups and
migrating users to Microsoft forums that include Microsoft Answers,
TechNet and MSDN. This move will centralize content, make it easier for
contributors to retain their influence, reduce redundancies and make
content easier to find. Overall, forums offer a better spam management
platform that will improve customer satisfaction by encouraging a healthy
discussion space."

Microsoft also feels their customers will be better served by centralizing
support. Instead of trekking across, well, thousands of newsgroups, the
answers will be located in Microsoft's forums.

There might be a bit of confusion going on as to what extent Microsoft's
newsgroups will be terminated. Microsoft may eliminate their news server,
but the newsgroups are freely roaming entities that exist on Usenet.
Perhaps Balmer & company will execute a kill order for their newsgroups,
but the news release from Microsoft really doesn't answer this pertinent
question.

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On Mon, 10 May 2010 03:55:09 +0200, Frank Merlott wrote:
> There might be a bit of confusion going on as to what extent Microsoft's
> newsgroups will be terminated. Microsoft may eliminate their news server,
> but the newsgroups are freely roaming entities that exist on Usenet.

This is to be expected... If M$ only kills their own news server, other
news servers will still offer microsoft.* newsgroups.
> Perhaps Balmer & company will execute a kill order for their newsgroups,
> but the news release from Microsoft really doesn't answer this pertinent
> question.

I've been told that IF they send rmgroup messages, then users will be
free to re-create the microsoft.* hierarchy.

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Frank Merlott wrote:
> Microsoft is announcing the end of their support newsgroups. In total,
> Microsoft currently supports over 2,000 public newsgroups, and 2,200
> private newsgroups that contain a variety of discussions on just about
> every Microsoft product available. And apparently this is all coming to an
> end starting in June of 2010.

Microsoft has been posting in the microsoft.public.* newsgroups about
their decision. If you want to see Microsoft's propaganda showing their
excuse for discontinuing NNTP service and their webnews-for-boobs
interface to Usenet (so they could pretend they had those forums), see:

Even if non-Microsoft NNTP providers continue carrying the
microsoft.public.* newsgroups, there will likely be a huge drop off in
participating by Microsoft's customers. Many used the webnews-for-boobs
interface that hid Usenet from those customers. However, as with users
that use kill files or connect to NNTP servers that filter out the
Google Groupers, losing the initiative-lacking, knee-jerk posting,
need-their-diapers-changed users might not be a bad thing for Usenet.
Those newsgroups might revert back to a more professional and more
expert community of users. You know, what the tech newsgroups used to
be like before AOL opened the floodgates and leech sites, like Microsoft
and other, providing webnews interface brought in all those boobs.

Remember that Microsoft only runs one NNTP server in a huge worldwide
mesh network of peering NNTP servers. That Microsoft drops their NNTP
server does not necessarily mean that anyone else will drop the
microsoft.public.* newsgroups. However, it is has been seen that some
NNTP providers are using Microsoft's decision as an excuse to lower
their bandwidth and disk space requirements by also dropping the those
microsoft.public.* newsgroups.

Microsoft is offering an NNTP-to-forum proxy that you run locally to let
your NNTP server connect to *some* of their forums. There aren't as
many forums as there are microsoft.public.* newsgroups; for example,
when Microsoft drops the microsoft.public.virtualpc newsgroup (and
excluding non-Microsoft NNTP servers that may continue to carry that
newsgroup), there will no longer be a specific discussion group for
VirtualPC because Microsoft does not have a forum for it. Rather than
do as other webnews leeching sites do by running an forum-to-NNTP
peering *server* to make their posts available on Usenet, Microsoft is
going ass backwards and making their users run a local NNTP-to-forum
proxy as a *client* to access their forums.

Their forums are often down so if you use their proxy then expect lots
of outages with subsequent errors from your newsreader. Also, Microsoft
never did like Usenet because they had no control over it and still
doesn't understand even the basics of Usenet posts regarding RFCs
dictating the standards used for NNTP. For example, Microsoft does NOT
include the domain portion (rightside-ID) in the Message-ID header that
they produce for their forum posts gatewayed through their proxy client.
A MID header should have <leftside-ID@rightside-ID> but with Microsoft
the @rightside-ID is missing. This is causing lots of problems with
many newsreaders that rely on the MID for tracking and sorting. This
problem of an invalid MID header is over a year old and still has not
been addressed.

After installation, Microsoft does not setup or offer a user-configured
option to load their local NNTP-to-forum proxy automatically when you
login. Even if you create a shortcut in your Startup group, the proxy
will not automatically login to their server. You have to open their UI
and manually initiate the login. There is no means to configure on
which port their proxy listens for a connection from your newsreader.
Port 119 is all they support so you'll have to change any other process
that may already be using that listening port, like if you run Hamster
or some other proxy used for filtering the NNTP posts. Also, if you
look at their userID login screen (you must create a Live ID), it says
it was not developed by Microsoft.

There are newsgroups for which there are no matching forums. So when
those newsgroups are killed off (and only if you rely on Microsoft's
NNTP server and only if other NNTP providers follow suit), there will no
longer be a discussion group for those topics. There are many
newsgroups under microsoft.public.* which have no forum counterpart.
Their web-based forums are slow and often incur an outage (which means
using their NNTP-to-forum proxy software will be just as flaky but I
found it faster to access the forums than their own web interface).
Whether the microsoft.public.* newsgroups disappear really depends on
the rest of the Usenet mesh network. They might continue carrying those
newsgroups or they might use it as an excuse to drop them.

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